«I found an island in your arms, Country in your eyes, Arms that chain, Eyes that lie, Break on through to the other side, Break on through to the other side, ☀ yeah !»

Here are the 17 shots I chose to post to and my Flickr. For technical reasons, as well as because I wanted to keep my comeback as quiet as possible, I have set their dates to an earlier year. I also decided, instead of posting a new entry, to edit one of 2006 which made no sense anymore. Anyway, human time is not important in the rock and tree kingdom of Pezi. One full day up there and it was as if we had been there for 3 years. Go there!…

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Two weeks already as a self deportee in a windy and cold Ikaria and I am looking through Eleni’s art books as I have done before. I found «THE GREEK SLAVE» by Jean-Léon Gérôme. The genre is neoclassicism, sub-genre ‘orientalism’, between cartoon and photography and trop bourgeois if you ask my opinion as a whole, but the Slave captured me. I think she makes an exception. It’s not another Ancient Greece nude, by the way. She a captive in the War of Greek Independence and she is being sold in the markets of Egypt. The painting is unfinished and this adds to the charm. Maybe in the end she managed to escape?..

I have a friend fireman (they also do salvage and recovery) who takes pleasure in telling me stories about hikers wounded or lost in impossible places around the island, hikers who were found and saved by the local rescue teams. When, my friend said, the rescuers asked the unfortunate hikers how they got to that place, they took out and showed them standard maps with various trails marked on them.

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Only that, though the lines on those maps were very convincing, the trails themselves weren’t visible or did not exist at all. The hikers found themselves following abstract lines drawn by somebody on a piece of paper, whereas there was nothing on the ground; no signs, no marks. Just bushes and rocks. And the inevidable and very perplexing goat trails.

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Cases of lost and distressed hikers are few in Ikaria, however, as more and more maps come about showing -besides motor roads- (…) «hiking trails» (…), I am obliged to warn every hiker of Ikaria to mistrust these publications and to not venture outside the marked paths.

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A hiking route marked in orange (or other) is a route that takes you somewhere. And most importantly, when you are tired, it’s a route that takes you back home.

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Notice, for example, in this group of photos the hikers cross jungled forests and steep cliffs one after the other. It’s hot and they often loose they way. But they are young and they are from the island so they don’t care.

But YOU STRANGER don’t ride on the Ikarian cliffs just because a map tells you so. Don’t ride, if you see no marking.

One more of the Simply series to respond to soulsister’s request. A pleasure actually as JR’s photos from Ikaria are… well, see for yourselves. The source blog is in Finnish, how original!.. Google translated the titles in English. Move over the thumbnails to read them. The order is by date from 2-5-08 to 27-7-08. If you hate scrolling down this long page, you can have it the horizontal way and look at Jonna’s photos from Ikaria one after the other in a special gallery. Enjoy.